“It’s not that, exactly.”
“Your relations with women are your own business. It’s been my observation that the great detectives are inclined to be celibate. Not through inadequacy, but because they have passed through the stage of sexual activity before developing their highest powers. Wolfe, of course, fathered a daughter before embracing misogyny wholeheartedly. Holmes was devoted to The Woman but lived alone. Perry Mason never so much as took hold of Delia Street’s hand. Poirot always had an eye for a pretty figure, but no more than his eye was ever engaged. Their assistants, however, were apt to go to the opposite extreme. I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, but I would have no objection to your leading an active sexual life. You could bring women here, Chip. They could attend the breakfast table with no embarrassment.”
But of course the embarrassment would come long before they got to the breakfast table. Because you cannot make an initial pitch to a girl and lead her up an alleyway and into what is unmistakably a Puerto Rican whorehouse without creating an atmosphere which is not precisely perfect. So I keep my room on 18th Street, and consistently fail to lure girls to it anyway, and Haig and I maintain this running argument.
I drank two beers at Dominick’s and hung around there until the late news came and went. There was nothing about Melanie, which wasn’t all that surprising. If every drug overdose made the eleven o’clock news, they wouldn’t have time for wars or assassinations. I threw darts at Dominick’s dart board without distinguishing myself. I thought a lot about Melanie, and I remembered what she’d been like alive and how she had looked in death, and all of a sudden I was very damned glad I was working for Leo Haig, because we were going to get the son of a bitch who killed her and nail his hide to the wall.
Four
In the morning the man next door had a coughing fit, and I woke up before the alarm clock went off. I picked up a Times on the way over to Haig’s house. In the courtyard, Carmelita was hanging out underwear on a clothesline running between two ailanthus trees. I have a lot of respect for those trees; anything that can come up out of a crack in a New York sidewalk deserves a lot of credit.
“You up early,” she said.
“So are you.”
“I am not go to bed yet. Busy night.”
“Business is good, huh?”
“All time sailors. Want to fock like crazy. Drink and fock, drink and fock.”
“Well,” I said.
“Margarita, she so sore. Fockin’ sailors. Mos’ tricks, all they want is the blow job. Get the other from their wife. Fockin’ sailors, they get blow job alla time on the boat, alla they wanna do is fock. So everybody gets sore.”
“Oh,” I said.
I went upstairs and into the office. Haig was busy playing with his fish tanks. I opened the paper and found the article about Melanie and started reading it. Wong came in on tiptoe with a couple of cups of strong coffee. He and I smiled at each other and he went away. Haig went on feeding the fish and I went on reading. A couple of paragraphs from the bottom I must have voiced a thought without realizing it, because Haig turned to face me and said, “Why?”
“Huh?”
“You said you’ll be a son of a bitch. I was wondering why.”
“I knew she had some income,” I said. “But I never thought it amounted to that much. I mean, she never even offered to pay for her own brown rice, for Pete’s sake.”
“Make sense, Chip.”
I blinked at him. “I was right about her age,” I said. “She turned twenty-one in May and came into the principal of her inheritance. According to the Times her share came to a little over two million dollars.”
“Interesting,” he said.
“But then why did she live like that? Suppose she didn’t want to touch the principal, what would the interest be on two million dollars?”
“Well over a hundred thousand dollars a year.”
“I’ll be a son of a bitch.”
“So you’ve said.”
“I used to buy subway tokens for her. She could have gone home in a limousine. It’s unreal.”
He seated himself on his side of the desk and held out his hand for the paper. I gave it to him and he read the article through several times, pausing to stroke his beard between paragraphs. Now and then he made a sort of clicking sound with his tongue or teeth. I don’t know how he makes that sound exactly or just what it’s supposed to indicate. When he had read most of the print off the page he set the paper down and closed his eyes for a moment.
Then he said, “You have your notebook? Good. There are several things you have to do. The funeral is at two tomorrow afternoon. Had you planned to go?”
“I hadn’t even thought about it. Of course I’ll go.”
“I think you should, for reasons in addition to your feelings for Miss Trelawney. In the meantime, there are places you should go and people you might profitably meet.”
He talked for a while, and I wrote things down in my notebook.
I got to the library at 42nd and Fifth a little before the lunch crowd took over the steps. I went through the New York Times Index for the past three years and made a lot of notes, then headed over to the microfilm room and filled out a request slip. A girl with Dick Tracy’s chin brought me little boxes of film and showed me how to use the viewer.
At first it was slow going because I tended to get sidetracked. I would be scanning my way through back issues and happen to hit an article that looked interesting, so I would stop and read it. After this happened a couple of times I realized what was going on and kept my mind on what I was there for.
Cyrus Trelawney had died three years ago. A combination of heart trouble, cirrhosis of the liver and general cussedness had taken him out five days after his eighty-first birthday. He was a widower at the time, and he left five daughters. The eldest, Caitlin, was then thirty-three. The others were Robin (twenty-seven), Jessica (twenty-one), Melanie (eighteen) and Kim (fifteen). It seemed to me that there ought to have been a thirty-year-old between Caitlin and Robin, just to preserve the symmetry. Maybe he’d had financial reverses around that time.
Although he didn’t seem to have had many financial reverses generally. The Times obit must have been an easy one to write, because Trelawney seems to have been a properly crusty old pirate. He had come to the States from Cornwall at the age of sixteen with a couple of silver shillings in his shoe, and I guess he was better at finding A Job With A Future than I’ll ever be, because in the next sixty-five years he parlayed those shillings into almost eleven million dollars, after taxes. He did most of this in ways that I’m not equipped to understand, financial transactions and mergers and takeovers and all those words you find in the business pages of the newspaper.
Trelawney used to claim he was descended from Cornish pirates, and the Times writer sort of implied that no one had any reason to doubt his claim on the basis of his performance in the world of finance. He was past forty before he married, and shortly thereafter he sat about producing daughters at three-year intervals, except for the one gap of six years. He was twenty years older than his wife and he outlived her by eight years.
I got a lot of information from the obituary notice and more information from various social page articles and the stories about the deaths of Robin and Jessica, but there’s no particular point in saying just what I learned where. I had to report it that way to Leo Haig, but I’ll just sketch in the general facts here.
Caitlin, the firstborn, was thirty-six now. She had been married at sixteen, but old Cyrus had it annulled. She was married again six years later, divorced two years after that, married again the following year and divorced again within a year. Now she was married for the fourth time — unless there had been a divorce since then that hadn’t made the papers. A couple of months before her father’s death, she’d exchanged gold bands with Gregory Depew Vandiver, of the Sands Point Vandivers, whoever the hell they are. The wedding announcement told all the schools he had attended and all the clubs he belonged to and described him as connected with a Wall Street firm with half a dozen very Protestant names in its title. After a honeymoon in Gstaad, The Times said, the Vandivers would make their home on the North Shore of Long Island.